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Puella Magi Adfligo Systema

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landcollector said:
Propellant seems pointless for munitions being shot via railgun.
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Not at all. The concept is very simple and quite sound in practice: railguns accelerate a munitions via electromagnetic induction. As long as the round is in contact with the rails, it accelerates. This remains true even if the round starts with an existing, nonzero velocity, or if there's a second source of acceleration being enacted on it. Or both.

So if a propellant accelerates a bullet to a given velocity, and a railgun accelerates a bullet to a given velocity... well, you can't just add them together because a higher start speed means less time on the rails, but it will be higher combined velocity than they were separate. Assuming sufficient charge to the rails.

The reason you want to forego propellant on real life railguns is to ease supply chains. If you only need a solid iron slug (or iron jacketed or whatever), that's a lot of manufacturing you can cut out of the process, and a much higher bullet quantity to storage space ratio. But with Mami-supplied magic bullets, supply chains are a non-issue.
 
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Phant0m5 said:
The reason you want to forego propellant on real life railguns is to ease supply chains. If you only need a solid iron slug (or iron jacketed or whatever), that's a lot of manufacturing you can cut out of the process, and a much higher bullet quantity to storage space ratio. But with Mami-supplied magic bullets, supply chains are a non-issue.
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Energy storage is also a non-issue, though, so couldn't we make an accelerator instead of a straight gun?
 
Torgamous said:
Energy storage is also a non-issue, though, so couldn't we make an accelerator instead of a straight gun?
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Maybe, but 1- a higher starting velocity would still be beneficial, even if the primary acceleration mechanism is faster than Mami's expanding ribbons after that initial boost, and 2- that would be relying less on our Mumi, which is unacceptable. Mumi is love, Mumi is life.
 
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Onmur said:
Now, now, Kirikannon is Kirikannon, sure, but you have to admit, "Kirikunition" has got a nice ring to it.

Let's just say, whenever we finally create the Kirikannon, we need to yell "Loading Kirikunition!" while loading the Kirika into the cannon.
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This kills the Kirika.

"eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee"
 
Theoretically we could just use a lump of grief to fling things at arbitrary velocities. Pretty sure we could hit cee-fractional speeds without issue. Our issues are:
  • Requires concentration.
  • We don't have very good aim.
  • We don't have very good tactical acuity.
  • We can't make projectiles - our grief-stuff dissolves if it leaves our control radius.
The solution, then, is pretty much what we're already doing with the woodpecker cannon:
  • Instead of just flinging things, we make a gun-shaped user interface, and Mami aims and fires.
  • Mami makes the projectiles, which also gives us specialist munitions (AP, HE, paintball, tangler, taser, you name it she can probably make it).
Phant0m5 said:
Also, on giving away clear Seeds for free: we should also ask for an optional donation of two Grief Seeds in exchange. One is cleared and goes back to the buyer, the other is kept. Every Grief Seed acquired is another clear Seed to be made, and if people bring in their own Seeds that means more clear ones to go around. The buyer comes out way ahead, and we end up with an extra seed to spread around to those less fortunate.
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Sadly, that setup would make them think we're trying to scam them somehow. Once word gets out about clear seeds and people start trusting us, it'd work, but not until then.
 
Vebyast said:
The solution, then, is pretty much what we're already doing with the woodpecker cannon:
  • Instead of just flinging things, we make a gun-shaped user interface, and Mami aims and fires.
  • Mami makes the projectiles, which also gives us specialist munitions (AP, HE, paintball, tangler, taser, you name it she can probably make it).
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Woodpecker Cannon is good in that not only is Mami firing it with her almost-precog precision, it's also Magic Damage, as opposed to our Prima Luce, or our capability to fling physical objects at high speeds, which are mundane damage.

Magic Damage should be better against Walpurgisnacht.
 
Vebyast said:
Theoretically we could just use a lump of grief to fling things at arbitrary velocities. Pretty sure we could hit cee-fractional speeds without issue. Our issues are:
  • Requires concentration.
  • We don't have very good aim.
  • We don't have very good tactical acuity.
  • We can't make projectiles - our grief-stuff dissolves if it leaves our control radius.
The solution, then, is pretty much what we're already doing with the woodpecker cannon:
  • Instead of just flinging things, we make a gun-shaped user interface, and Mami aims and fires.
  • Mami makes the projectiles, which also gives us specialist munitions (AP, HE, paintball, tangler, taser, you name it she can probably make it).
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Yes. These are all things which are true, and completely self-explanatory within the scope of the testing done. You didn't actually need to point all this out.

The railgun is specifically to launch Mami-made ammunition at higher velocities than the woodpecker cannon can manage. C-fractional lumps of grief have nothing to do with that. This needs to be an actual launching platform because we are not controlling that ammunition, nor aiming anything. And we want it to be faster because we are not yet at Sufficient Velocity.

Hence, railgun. Or propellant assisted railgun, whichever.
 
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Torgamous said:
Grief sabot manages that without the limitations of railguns. Railgun is just to be cool.
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No Partially; railgun is more because it's a weapon Mami can use that requires almost no attention from us, aside from loading the Mami-made ammunition. If you wanted to go with a Grief sabot to accelerate real ammunition, we'd be better off skipping the weapon entirely and just catapulting rocks using bowls of Grief.

We don't even need to pay attention to the electric currents, aside from maintaining the Grief constructs. Just load the bullets into a rail-free chamber, and the ribbon propellant will launch it into the barrel as per usual; it just so happens that there are magnetic accelerators in the barrel.
 
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Phant0m5 said:
No Partially; railgun is more because it's a weapon Mami can use that requires almost no attention from us, aside from loading the Mami-made ammunition. If you wanted to go with a Grief sabot to accelerate real ammunition, we'd be better off skipping the weapon entirely and just catapulting rocks using bowls of Grief.
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That's exactly the proposal that I was responding to with my post. There are a number of reasons why it's better to hand Mami a gun-shaped object that catapults anything she loads into it; same fundamental mechanism, but better overall capabilities. Note that we have infinite proprioception and multitasking when it comes to simple grief manipulation, meaning that it's better for us to handle all the mechanical bits as mechanically as possible and hand executive control off to Mami.
 
Idea for Walpurgis: should we see about getting a teleporter (or giving Mami a grief enchant to copy) so her ammo could just ignore what makes out like (taking this number from free air) more than half of its defence? The Mandala shield of +50 defence or whatever?

For the sake of being clear: I am talking about a sort of blip-ammunition.
Shoot bullet => bullet "teleports" inside of Walpurgis shield (space between shield and ht "main body" itself) => hits Walpurgis in the face
if the Mandala is also protective from the inside it would also make a nice blastshield for Mitakihara, less collateral, more BOOM to hit Walpurgis with.

Sound good?
 
Might be difficult to find a teleporter without safety features, but it's worth a shot. Enchanting specialized ammunition might be a good thing for everyone without ranged attacks to do, actually.
 
Phant0m5 said:
Partially; railgun is more because it's a weapon Mami can use that requires almost no attention from us, aside from loading the Mami-made ammunition.
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Making a gun that uses grief manipulation to accelerate the projectile would be more efficient than using magnetic acceleration.

Despite the maxim that "there is no overkill", in an atmosphere, excessive velocity can actually be a problem. Projectiles can ablate before they reach the target, and impact can produce a blast wave that could be dangerous to the shooter at short engagement distances or cause collateral damage.

TL;DR: Probably not worth doing for normal witches. Save it for Walpy or the Incubators' homeworld. :p
 
Vebyast said:
Worth posting: What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light?
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That's a favorite of mine (I have that guy's book), but you don't even need to get up to relativistic speeds to have Bad Things happen. At speeds greater than around 3 km/s (the point at which the kinetic energy of the object equals its weight in TNT), everything explodes on impact. High-velocity kinetic weapons (at least ones powerful enough to be worth our trouble) are something that we'll have to use very carefully if we don't want to commit suicide or fratricide (sororicide?) with our own splash damage.
 
Matou Sutegobana said:
It's an estimate. I don't have a reliable means to time when a light is switched on that doesn't involve me pressing the switch.
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Nine minutes, though? You wouldn't even be able to play normal baseball. You'd be struck out before you even registered that the first ball had been thrown. And if you got a walk they'd have to break for commercial while everyone in the stands took the chance for a bathroom break.
 
Torgamous said:
Nine minutes, though? You wouldn't even be able to play normal baseball. You'd be struck out before you even registered that the first ball had been thrown. And if you got a walk they'd have to break for commercial while everyone in the stands took the chance for a bathroom break.
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60 seconds is how long it takes me to swing a bat while awkwardly holding a cheap stopwatch in one hand. Reaction speed to an object traveling at 90% light speed will have to wait until I can aquire a particle accelerator.
 
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